


Counting Stars

by Raptor_Squad



Series: Native [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, BAMF Steve Rogers, Character Study, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, I wrote this years ago, Non-Graphic Violence, POV Natasha Romanov, Pining, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Protective Steve Rogers, Songfic, and then i fell back in love with it so i'm turning this into a series, romanogers - Freeform, set during the winter soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-29 23:07:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17817278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raptor_Squad/pseuds/Raptor_Squad
Summary: Leading up to, and through, the events of The Winter Soldier, Natasha pulls Captain America into the new world, brave or otherwise.But she falls in love with Steve.A/N: I wrote this a long while ago and randomly found it again so I'm posting it and continuing the series. Each part will be a song from OneRepublic's album, NATIVE.





	Counting Stars

**Six**

_“Lately, I’ve been, I’ve been losing sleep. Dreaming about the things that we could be. But baby, I’ve been, I’ve been praying hard, said no more counting dollars, we’ll be counting stars. Yeah, we’ll be counting stars.”_

* * *

 They start after the clusterfuck that is New York. Natasha should, could, would, say that they start after she meets him, but nobody was really sleeping during that ordeal and she likes her plausible deniability, thank you very much. She is used to nightmares, used to seeing the faces of those she’s killed behind closed eyelids. But a few nights after Loki is kicked off world, when Natasha finally succumbs to sleep (god knows she doesn’t go willingly) it is not her ghosts that she sees, but the face of one Captain America. He’s even smiling at her.  

And it’s not just memories of the battle, because even _that_ would make more sense. No, these _dreams_ – dreaming, what a concept – are of whimsy and fantasy and all of the things Natasha Romanoff has absolutely no time for. She wakes up in a cold sweat after the first one, because dreaming about holding hands with Captain America is more frightening than reliving the hospital fire. 

They aren’t frequent, at first, and thank god for that because as good as Natasha is at compartmentalizing, she can’t _not_ wonder if his lips taste like justice and righteousness, and those are thoughts she most definitely _shouldn’t_ be having during debriefings, but once Fury sticks them together and tells her to “keep him in the game, Romanoff,” almost all bets are off. 

“Captain,” she nods at him in greeting when he meets her in the lobby of the Triskelion, fresh off a quinjet from New York.  

“Agent Romanoff,” he gives her a little smile and Natasha _does not_ think about what it would feel like to have him smile into a kiss.

_He’s at the peak of the human condition; it’s completely normal for my body to react._

“I’ve been assigned to bring you up to speed” Natasha turns and starts walking towards the garage level, feeling him fall into step beside her. 

“I don’t need a babysitter, Agent Romanoff,” Rogers’ voice is disgruntled and deep.

“Natasha,” she doesn’t know why it’s important that he call her anything _but_ Agent Romanoff but it is and maybe she just wants to hear her name fall from his lips, “or Nat, if you prefer. But I will skin you alive if you call me Tasha,” she peeks sideways at him when they step into the elevator just in time to see one corner of his mouth quirk up into a smile. 

“Alright, _Natasha_ ,” his voice is deep and caresses her name like a lover coming home and she suddenly wants to drink his name from his lips, but before her mind can run away with lusty thoughts, he continues, “I really don’t need a babysitter,” he leans against one wall of the elevator and crosses his arms and damn him for wearing a leather jacket and _who the hell bought him fitted jeans._

“Tell me something, Captain Rogers-”

“Steve.” He interrupts her.

“Excuse me?” she turns to face him, and leans against the elevator wall opposite his, hands behind her back. 

“If I get to call you Natasha, you have to call me Steve. I’m only Captain when I’m in body armor,” and there’s that damn half smile again and she can just see a hint of bright whites. 

“Okay _Steve,_ tell me how well your adjusting to modern life then, hmm?” she narrows her eyes at him because not for nothing is she called Black Widow. She plows ahead before he can answer with whatever sad excuse he can come up with, “because from what I’ve heard, you spend a lot of time breaking gym equipment, ignoring phone calls, and visiting Arlington,” for whatever reason, and not because she feels like she just kicked a puppy, Natasha softens her gaze when she sees his shoulders slump and his eyes darken with grief and sorrow. 

“Besides,” she turns forward just as the elevator stops and calls over her shoulder as she steps out, “you don’t get enough pop culture references. If you’re going to be an Avenger, you need to understand the references, which means you’re going to have to watch a lot of movies.” Natasha hears his sigh of resignation before the sound of his footsteps. 

“What’s your job in all of this?” he asks just as they approach her silver sports car. For a moment, Natasha worries about whether he’ll fit or not. 

“Why Steve, I thought you’d never ask,” she bats her eyelashes at him as she unlocks the doors and gets in. 

“Nothing too invasive, so don’t pout,” she says as they pass through the gates and enter D.C traffic “I’m just showing you your apartment today. Tomorrow’s the fun stuff,” she winks at him just as she runs a red light. 

**Five**

_“I see this life like a swinging vine, swing my heart across the line. In my face is flashing signs, seek it out and ye shall find. Old, but I’m not that old. Young, but I’m not that bold, And I don’t think the world is sold, I’m just doing what we’re told.”_

* * *

They go on missions together (Natasha is sure that Fury knows about her dreams and is taunting her, the smug bastard). The dreams become more frequent and more saccharine in their content. _Why can’t I just dream of him running towards me naked? Why am I dreaming about going on a date with the guy?_ She tries to keep her distance: keeps all interactions strictly business oriented. It doesn’t last long. Any soldier can attest to the fact that you can’t fight alongside someone and _not_ form a bond. It just doesn’t work that way. _But I’m not a soldier; I’m a spy. I serve a directive, not a flag._

Despite that fact though, Natasha has to admit that they work well together. They’re good at predicting each other’s moves, at silently communicating in a way that she was convinced only she and Barton could do. This comes quicker though, Natasha and Clint learned each other’s muscles, learned how to read each other’s expressions over the course of dozens of missions undercover. Her and Steve, on the other hand, seamlessly mesh together in a way that leaves glorious carnage in their wake. 

“It’s a sick, cosmic joke that _Captain America,_ is constantly partnered up with _Black Widow,_ ” she hears Rumlow grumbling to another STRIKE team member on one of their missions into the middle east. She dutifully ignores how true his statement rings and how ridiculous she is for wanting Captain America in the first place.

That night, for the first time in months, Natasha dreams of death, but this time, it is Steve’s heart she has just fired a bullet into. She wakes up choking on a scream. 

In her wake, _in the Black Widow’s wake,_ a bloody trail of broken hearts and broken bones and broken necks paves a road. She’s lived a thousand lives, and the morning after she puts a bullet into Steve, she actually feels a thousand years old. The logical thing for her to do is keep Steve at more of a distance, keep him far away from her bloodstained hands. 

Of course, that is the opposite of what she actually does because Natasha Romanoff does _not_ run away. She can overcome her idiotic schoolgirl crush on Captain America. She doesn’t attempt to jump his bones or anything (although the thought has crossed her mind) but she doesn’t stop the flirtations or casual comfort they’ve developed between them. They’re friends. What a concept, stranger even than dreaming, and Natasha admits that the odd feeling she gets in her chest when Steve hugs her is, well, _nice._

She spends nights when they aren’t working on his couch, eating popcorn and candy and crossing movies off of Steve’s list (her idea, and a secret thrill runs through her when she sees the notebook he’s taken to carrying around with him). 

“Nat, what are we watching tonight? What year are we at now?” Steve calls to her from his kitchen where he is presumably making popcorn and grabbing drinks. A shiver goes up her spine, as it almost always does these days, when he says her name. Natasha tries (read: fails) to ignore how much he sounds like her dreams right then. 

 

_“Hey, doll,” Steve brushes a kiss to her forehead as he passes her on the way to the bedroom. He’s fresh off a quinjet, back from a two week mission in China, and even though he looks a little worn and smells like smoke and ash, Natasha’s heart gives a fierce kick at his return._

_“Hey,” she gets up from the couch where she was typing a report and follows him. He leaves the adjoining bathroom door open and she plops onto the bed even though they had figured out a few weeks ago how to have fun in the shower together._

_He showers in silence and she just watches the faint outline of his body through the frosted glass. When he emerges to wrap a towel around his waist, she finally speaks up._

_“I missed you,” her murmur is quiet but she knows he heard her from the slight stiffening of his shoulders. Natasha isn’t very forthcoming with her feelings, even though she most definitely feels them, sometimes too much, so she knows she’s taken him by surprise with her admission. He doesn’t answer; he just dries himself and dons a pair of sweatpants that unfairly outline his Adonis belt, that damn half smile playing on his lips. He walks over to where she’s sitting on the edge of the bed and silently bends to capture her mouth with his._

_“I missed you, too, Nat,” he whispers against her lips before pulling back a little with a mischievous glimmer in his eyes._

_“Besides,” he continues while one hand drops to her neck to feel her – increasing – pulse, “I’m behind on my list. We should be in the last decade by now but we’re still in the 90s,” he grins at her before planting another kiss on her lips and then getting up to walk into the kitchen._

_“You’re the one who decided he wanted to add TV series’ to the mix! Friends is gonna take a while,” she grumbles as she fights the blush forming on her cheeks._

 

“Nat? Nat! Natasha!” Steve is standing in front of her, snacks forgotten on the coffee table, hands on either side of her face, a worried crease between his brows, and it is with an almost startling jolt that Natasha realizes that she’s been daydreaming about Captain America.

“What?” she inwardly curses her voice for coming out breathy and dazed. 

“You didn’t answer for a bit there, doll. I was worried, your concussion-” he slowly moves his hands from her face and she really does try to think about anything but the fact that his hands are _so large._ The first time he called her doll, in that almost _southern_ Brooklyn drawl, he had blushed so severely Natasha thought his head just might explode from mortification. When she asked about it, Steve got a little wistful look in his eyes and then said that it was just another thing from his time. 

“I’m fine, just running through your list. We’re at 1996, Fight Club,” she pulls up the Netflix menu on the Wii (her idea, again, and she will actually admit to liking the fact that she has her own profile on his account). 

“What’s this one about?” he settles in next to her, bowl of popcorn in his lap, and tosses her boxes of candy that he’s taken to keeping in his pantry for her visits. 

“We may have to watch this one twice. It’s deeply psychological,” she feels more than sees him stiffen next to her. 

“Don’t worry Steve,” her voice drops in pitch and her words come out softer than they should, “no triggers. It's too subversively funny for that. I promise. But if it starts to get to you, let me know, okay? We’ll watch something else,” Natasha doesn’t know what possesses her to do it, but she reaches over and clasps one of his bear-paws in hers. He gives her a small grin and nods almost imperceptibly so she leans back, hand still in his, and presses play. 

 

_She had broken into his apartment one night after she got back from a solo mission, because, well, she could. She had been content to just sit in his living room and flip through his life until he woke up so she could scare-slash-surprise him, but a hoarse whimper had thrown that idea completely out of the window. She had seen Steve take brutal blows and bullets without so much as a grunt, so to hear him actually whimper was a jolt. She had crept into his room, silent as her namesake, and if she were a weaker woman, she would’ve cried at the sight that greeted her. Steve was wrapped into a ball, as small as his large frame could possibly get, shivering fiercely. Tears had been streaming from his clenched eyes and sweat dotted his brow. It had never occurred to her that his nightmares would be of ice and cold but shows what she knew._

_She had woken him up gently, calling his name and petting back his hair, while simultaneously wrapping his blanket around him further. He had woken up dazed and scared and completely unsure of when he was so she had drawn him a hot bath and plunked him in it, pajama pants and all. When he came to, she was pushing him back into bed, sans soaked pajama pants (she may have stared at his butt when changing him but that was it), and he didn’t even question her presence in his apartment, just pulled her impossibly close and hugged her, and then he fell asleep. It would’ve been really easy for her to stay in that position, wrapped up in his warmth, in his bed, but for all her courage, she couldn’t take that leap. He said didn’t remember her coming over the next morning, but sometimes she would catch him looking at her just a little bit longer than necessary._  

 

As the movie progresses, and the snacks diminish, she somehow ends up with her legs across Steve’s lap, forehead pressed into his shoulder. It’s likely the most intimate position she’s ever been in that wasn’t related to a mark and she almost lets herself nod off during one of Tyler’s monologues. Almost. She’s not that far gone. _Yet_.

It’s late when they finish the movie for the second time, and Natasha can feel her concussion in the small headache at the base of her skull, but ignores it when Steve chuckles and shakes his head at the insanity that is Fight Club. 

“You’re more than welcome to stay, Nat,” he says as they’re cleaning up his living room, the credits rolling in the background. She starts to refuse, even though she wants to say yes, but he continues before she can get the first syllable out. 

“I insist, actually. I know you can take care of yourself but I’m old-fashioned, and I cannot, in good conscious, let a lady go home by herself in the dark. Besides, someone’s gotta make sure you keep breathing through the night,” he grins at her over his shoulder as he walks back into the kitchen. There are a million arguments Natasha could make to his statements like, for one, she’s not a lady, and for two, her concussion isn’t even that bad, but then what he’s really saying hits her, full fucking force. He _knows_ she can take care of herself, he’s not making the mistake of underestimating her like so many fools before him, he’s just _worried_ about her. Because they’re _friends_ , they’re _partners,_ and that’s what Steve does – he worries about other people. A character flaw, surely. 

When he comes back into the living room where Natasha’s frozen in thought, a nervous smile playing on his lips, she thinks about how easy it would be for her to just kiss him right then. As willing as she is to hitch a ride on a flying Chitauri cruiser, planting one on Steve Rogers feels like too bold a move. So instead of kissing him and finding out if he tastes as good as he smells (and the damn man always smells good, even after a bomb goes off) she just nods with a half smile of her own, and lets him show her to his guest room, as if she doesn’t have the blueprints for his building memorized. 

It’s nice, Natasha decides, to have someone care about her. 

When he wakes her up every hour on the hour with a gentle shake and the soft murmur of her name, she let’s herself believe that the soft look he gives her means more than caring. 

**Four**

_“I feel something so right, by doing the wrong thing. And I feel something so wrong, by doing the right thing. I couldn’t lie, couldn’t lie, couldn’t lie. Everything that kills me makes me feel alive.”_

* * *

Time passes. They go on missions, small counterintelligence and counterterrorist attacks, pieces of cake by interstellar-clusterfuck standards. They watch movies on his couch together, Steve demands TV shows too when she makes one-too-many _Friends_ references during a mission to India and even though she outwardly grumbles, inwardly she smiles at the chance to spend more time with him. And they flirt, it’s harmless, really, and she does it just to make him blush, but he surprises her every time he makes a come back and her jaw nearly drops when he winks at her before jumping from a quinjet without a parachute. 

She really should distance herself more. She should stop looking for excuses to spend time with him. She should _definitely_ stop thrilling every time he pulls her close behind his shield when something blows up nearby. She should _most definitely for the love of guns_ stop wishing it didn’t take an explosion for him to pull her close. 

_They’re just dreams, why are your panties in such a twist?_

Because they aren’t just dreams. Well, yeah, they started out that way, but he’s _Steve_ and he is good and warm and unapologetically non-judgmental. She likes the way he takes people on their own salt, likes the way he stubbornly stands for everything right and ideal, despite the crap the world keeps throwing his way. 

She likes the way he almost carelessly throws his arm across the back of the couch and lets her snuggle into the crevice between his arm and body when they’re watching movies. The sensation of his warmth so nearby, so tangibly cocooning her in his presence, feels so perfectly _right_ that it takes her completely by surprise in the middle of _The Lion King._ Because it shouldn’t feel good being this close to him, because he is good and light and she is not and her hands are stained bloody, and _this is wrong._ But the way he sometimes strokes her shoulder, or insists she stay the night, the way he makes her breakfast and knows how she takes her coffee, and the _look_ he sometimes gives her before she leaves, well, they all feel existentially _right._

So Natasha starts setting him up on dates. The world knows who he is; the only reason he can go out in public is because all they see is the mask he wears (sometimes). But he is a publicly recognized figure and she knows he’s getting fan mail. And also, because he’s _Steve_ and he’s gorgeous and tall and kind and women (and men) would have to be blind and deaf to not see him. They start out slow, one every few weeks or so, but then she builds him up until he’s sometimes going on two or three a week. He always answers the same when she asks about it the next time they see each other, _“so-and-so was nice and it was lovely, but there will not be another date. Sorry, Nat”_ and she always pretends to not be happy about it. 

She does actually try to find him someone, because Natasha Romanoff does nothing in half-measures. She goes over Agent Carter’s dossier and is about to set him up with someone she thinks is similar enough when something catches her eye. _Nursing home._ Which means Steve is probably visiting her (he would’ve strong-armed Fury into telling him one way or another, and yeah, Natasha likes the stubborn side of him too). She can’t do that to him, can’t throw an-almost-but-not-quite clone in his face while he’s clearly mourning a friend-slash-old-flame who isn’t gone yet. Natasha can be cold and calculating and uncaring, but she doesn’t want to be, especially not when it comes to Steve. For Peggy it’s been seventy years, for Steve it’s been a day. 

Maybe that’s why there won’t ever be another date. 

Natasha looks closer at Steve, looks beneath his usual patriotism and idealism and righteousness. And then she sees, how she didn’t see this before is baffling, but she sees. The sadness in his gaze, the faint bags under his eyes that have yet to completely fade, the slump in his shoulders before their movie nights, the dazed look he gets whenever they’re in Europe for a mission. 

Natasha backs off on the dates. She doesn’t stop them completely, because then he’d get suspicious, but she backs off enough. As much for him as she does for herself because yeah, she should be doing everything in her power to help him move on before Peggy dies and he is left completely destroyed and lost, but every date he agrees to with a half-smile sends her insides recoiling. She hides it well, the Red Room taught her that, but as much as Natasha will deny the existence of her feelings left and right, she can’t deny the throbbing emptiness that makes itself very known on the days she’s set him up to go out, not even to herself, though she tries.  

And then she takes a bullet to the leg on one of their missions to the Middle East, and she’s not _quite_ bleeding out, but she’s fairly certain it nicked an artery, so there’s a lot of blood. Steve curses, _curses_ , and then carries her out of the line of fire while the STRIKE team does its job. She hardly feels the pain, but she’s pretty certain it’s more due to his arms wrapped around her than her stupid training. She figures, if this is how she goes out, a fucking bullet to the leg in the middle of Afghanistan, that’s okay, because Steve’s holding her close and cursing the “ _fucking insurgent assholes”_ and calling for _“a goddamn extraction point because Romanoff’s hit”_ and putting pressure on her wound. After what she assumes is a frightened confirmation of extraction, he leans close to her face, close enough that she can see the varying stripes of blue and green and gold in his eyes and smell the mint aftershave he uses. 

Once upon a time, Natasha hated the smell of mint. 

She’s not really worried about the wound in her leg; it’ll just be one of many scars on her body, what she is worried about is the stupid increase of her heartbeat and the flashes of memories her subconscious has made about Steve being this close and she’s pretty sure that every nerve ending in her body is on alert. Later, she’ll blame it on the adrenaline and endorphins impairing her ability to think straight (even though a wound has almost never stopped her before) but not even Budapest made her feel this _alive._ Which would really suck, because maybe she’s about to die, and wouldn’t that be the biggest fucking irony of her life. 

“Nat, you with me?” he’s got his hands on her face and he’s giving her that soft look again and beyond the dust clearly covering them both, all she can really focus on is the largeness of his hands (seriously one hand is like the size of her whole face from hairline to jaw) and _when did he take his gauntlets off? And where did he get that callous on his finger from?_  

“I’m with you, Steve,” Natasha even manages a half-smile that doesn’t look too dazed. She doesn’t know when it happened, but somehow her hands have moved to put pressure on her wound ( _instinct_ , her mind whispers, which is really fucking sad) and then _he’s_ giving her a dopey half-smile in return and saying something but she can’t really focus on what because every part of her mind is completely taken by how soft his lips look. 

_Fuck, I’m in deep._

He’s lifting her again, _with one arm, Jesus Christ,_ while the other holds his shield against the wind and stray insurgent bullets. Natasha faintly hears a few bullets ricocheting off the vibranium, but the double-thud of Steve’s heart easily drowns it out. 

Fury doesn’t dare bench her, but she takes his hint of “I get that you’re Americanized now, Romanoff, but that doesn’t mean you have to work yourself into an early grave like the rest of us,” to basically mean the same thing. So she takes a couple weeks off, spends more time in Steve’s apartment, and studiously ignores the drawer of her clothes that he keeps in the spare bedroom. 

And then, _and fucking then because of course there’s always more_ , Fury dies and Natasha feels gutted. Steve is there, and she won’t admit it, but it helps that he’s there, his presence wrapping around her like the safety blanket of a child. But she runs because _Fury is dead_ and it’s the most wrong sounding thing she can think of, and she keeps running. 

That night, Natasha’s dreams are not of Steve Rogers hugging her, despite how much she wishes they were. That night, Natasha dreams of ghosts. She doesn’t bother choking off her screams in the morning. 

**Three**

_“Lately, I’ve been, I’ve been losing sleep. Dreaming about the things that we could be. But baby, I’ve been, I’ve been praying hard. Said no more counting dollars, we’ll be, we’ll be counting stars.”_

* * *

The night before they plan to burn down their world, Natasha finds Steve on top of the dam. The past few days, past week or so, really, have been straining on their friendship. The luggage under Steve’s eyes fades slower, his hands are often more clenched in restrained rage, and their movie nights are less frequent. He’s just standing there, a man against the world, staring at the sky as if some answers lie there. 

Steve is many things; sometimes dopey, sometimes silly, oftentimes sweeter than any soldier has a right to be, but he is not unperceptive. He’s probably more aware of his surroundings than most, and he is entirely aware of her approach. She doesn’t bother trying to hide it. 

“What are you doing?” it’s the middle of the night, there’s a bandage wrapped around her shoulder from where her ghost, _their ghost,_ shot her, and to be honest, she’s kinda exhausted. But she wanted to find Steve, because after the mission debriefing, _the last mission debriefing,_ he disappeared, and Fury pulled her aside. It’s never really a good thing when Fury pulls people aside but he had simply said, “you’re going to be compromised,” and she had said, “I know,” and then left to find Steve. 

Natasha knows what she’s doing, understands the impact her actions will have. Her sins are an endless list of lives taken, money stolen, and lies told, all scrolling in her mind almost constantly. _You lie and kill, in the service of liars and killers._ The way she figures it, if another ghost comes to get vengeance, well, she deserves their wrath. Maybe it’s time to pay her penance; her number’s been called. 

“Counting, praying, hoping,” his eyes don’t move from the few stars they can see. It’s considerably more than they could see in the city, but it’s not the same number of stars they’ve seen countless times from countless safe houses in countless countries. 

Natasha understands the praying; his file read ‘Catholic’. She even understands the hoping; he’s Captain America. 

“Counting?” she doesn’t look at the sky, she looks at him. Memorizes the shape and size of his Adam’s apple, the way his eyelashes sweep over his cheekbones, the way his hair falls a little messily away from his face with his head tilted like this, and the way his hands aren’t clenched tight around the railing. 

“Yeah. My ma used to tell me that all the saints became stars, but I said no way, because there are too many stars. And she told me that just because the church didn’t recognize them, didn’t mean they weren’t saints. She said, ‘saints are everywhere, doing good because someone needs to’. It’s silly, and I’m not too religious these days, especially after meeting Thor, but it seemed right,” he casts her a fleeting glance, free of shadows, before he looks back up. 

“So you’re counting because…” she lets her question trail off, letting him fill in the blanks even though she’s pretty much figured it out. 

“There are the saints I had to memorize as a kid. I’m thinking about all of the saints I’ll never meet, and I’m adding the people I know would be saints; Fury, Hill, Sam, the Avengers, you,” he meets her eyes then and Natasha feels like he’s staring straight through her because he’s giving her that _look_ again and she doesn’t know what to make of it. 

“You’re too idealistic, Rogers,” she almost can’t take his stare but she is the Black Widow and backing down is not what she does. _Dreaming about and crushing on super soldiers isn’t what Black Widow does, either._

“Tomorrow, the whole world is going to learn that I am the furthest thing from a saint,” she blinks then, breaks eye contact, stares across the forest that surrounds them. She doesn’t want him to see the vulnerability she knows he’ll find in her eyes; she doesn’t want him to see the _fear._

“I won’t read your file, Natasha,” she glances at him then, just to gauge whether he’s lying or not. He isn’t. 

She raises an eyebrow. He huffs in response. 

“If you wanted me to know, I’d know,” he shifts just that little bit closer, close enough for her to smell him and feel his radiating warmth. _The serum,_ he told her months ago on the couch, _raises my metabolism so my temperature is a little higher and I have to eat more._ Natasha thinks the warmth is just Steve, though, serum be damned. 

“Besides,” he hunches down a little so their faces are almost level, “it wouldn’t change the way I feel about you. Your past is your own, and if there’s anyone more deserving of redemption or sainthood, well, I’d like to meet them, because there’s no one who tries as hard to be good as you do, Nat,” and then he’s smiling that dopey half-smile at her again and the look softens more, if that’s even possible. 

Natasha is floored, completely unable to process the amount of trust he puts in her. He had said he would trust her to save his life, but it hadn’t really hit her until now. Natasha doesn’t really know how to respond, not with words at least, so she does something really stupid. 

She takes that half step forward and kisses him. 

She’s probably going to die tomorrow, or he is, though no one voiced those thoughts out loud at the debriefing, but they all know. If she doesn’t burn down with S.H.I.E.L.D. then the world will happily castrate her. If the Winter Soldier doesn’t kill Captain America, then his half-cocked plan to save Bucky might. The way Natasha sees things these days, and maybe it’s because they’ve watched one too many romantic comedies (you can’t update someone through film and skip _10 Things I Hate About You_ and _Grease_. It’s just unholy) but she thinks, if she’s going to burn down the world, she’s going to go up in fucking flames. 

And that’s what Steve’s kiss feels like. At first, she can tell she’s taken him by surprise, but then he moves with her. His lips are just as soft as they look, and impossibly warm to boot. Anxiety and more of an applying of pressure overrode the kiss on the escalator _,_ and Natasha will happily retract her comment about practice because seventy years on the ice has done nothing to impair his kissing abilities. The man can _kiss._ His tongue is not hesitant when it sweeps across her lower lip and his hands are firm and strong when they grip her waist and pull her closer until every part of her is pressed to him. When his head tilts to deepen the contact, Natasha is fairly certain the parts of her that were trained by the Red Room to keep control over her whole body at all times, completely evaporate. 

She pulls away, reluctantly, first. Only far enough to meet his eyes, their lips a whisper away from each other, and she is certain her pupils are as blows as his and _it should be illegal to look that god after a simple kiss._

“You’re a goddamn idiot,” is the first thing out of her mouth when she catches her breath. 

“I know,” and then he swoops in and kisses her again. Any and all arguments against what they’re doing die in her throat, overcome by breathy gasps when he kisses all around her jaw before reclaiming her mouth again. 

They don’t have sex that night, it feels too much like a goodbye, and maybe they’re both clinging onto the hope that they’ll survive the next day, but he walks her to her room and she falls into the first dreamless sleep she’s had for months. It feels unsettlingly foreboding: closing her eyes and not seeing Steve. 

The whole HYDRAgate thing passes by in a blur. Natasha’s nerves about spilling all of her secrets almost get to her, and then she hears Steve’s voice over the comms, and then she is calm, all thoughts focused on getting through this, getting back to that place where Steve and her could kiss under the stars. When she’s in the helicopter with Fury and Sam, with Maria’s voice steady over the comms, hope blooms in her chest. _Maybe we’ll make it out alive._

And then Steve’s helicarrier goes down, and Steve doesn’t respond over the comms, and all of Natasha’s thoughts are _Steve, Steve, Steve._

They don’t expect to find him, but Fury takes one look at Natasha’s face before insisting upon a search. She doesn’t thank him, but then again, she never has to. 

**Two**

_“I feel the love, and I feel it burn, down this river every turn, hope is our four letter word, make that money, watch it burn.”_

* * *

They find him; he’s on the banks of the Potomac and he’s just barely breathing but at least he’s alive and _thank god._

She refuses to leave when he’s in surgery and the setting is so frightfully, eerily familiar that she can feel a sob clawing it’s way up her throat. She slips her mask on when they declare him stable. She lets it slip when they tell her that they had to induce a coma. 

She watches over him. She exists, silently, with Sam Wilson, in Steve Rogers’ room, hope and exhaustion circling them both but Sam would use a different four-letter word to describe their presence. There are guards outside, trusted individuals who have proven no alliance to HYDRA, but whom Natasha would not feel uncomfortable killing should the need arise. 

She’s in court when he wakes up the first time, his serum enhanced body fighting the coma, and Sam’s voice alerts her over the comms just as the secretary of defense asks her another stupid question. Her residual fury at HYDRAgate coupled with her incessant need to be out of the spotlight and preference to be with Steve, fuels her final comments.  

The executive branch doesn’t bother her anymore, and she’s sure she’s going to have to call Stark and thank him but that’s a task for another day. Right now, all Natasha is going to do is wait. 

It’s not love, Natasha’s heart may have been leaning towards romance lately, but she’s not so idealistic to think that whatever is between them, is love. There is a specific burn in her chest though, leftover embers smoldering from their kiss, maybe. Or maybe it’s a flame, sparked to life by their kiss, built on the foundation of their time together. And if love feels anything like that, hell, if love feels like _more_ than that, well, with Steve, maybe it’s worth a try. 

Waiting in Steve’s room, Natasha has time to think, perhaps too much time. She’s alive, which means people will be looking for her with red in their eyes. She needs to make new covers, start over, her tactical mind coming up with dozens of different plans and angles to approach the behemoth of her ledger from. Watching Steve’s steady breaths (they removed the tube after the first day) reassures her that she did the right thing: that she can wipe the red in her ledger out. 

Natasha’s getting coffee when he wakes up. She can see Sam sitting in his customary chair, reading the newspaper. She hears the soft voice of Marvin Gaye in the background, Steve’s steady double-thud more prominent. She walks in just in time to hear Steve mumble “on your left” and the sound of his voice, sleep-addled and tired but his voice all the same, sends her cup of shitty coffee tumbling to the ground. 

She ignores Sam, though they’ve become almost friends in the recent days of watching over Steve, but senses him get up and leave the room mumbling about “well _someone_ has to tell the nurse he’s awake.” 

“You’re a goddamn idiot,” is the first thing she says to him, because he is. Natasha saw the patchwork of security videos, saw him _drop his fucking shield_ , saw him let the Winter Soldier beat him half to death, saw him tell the Winter Soldier to finish his mission. 

She saw Bucky Barnes cry. 

“I know,” he rasps out just as he reaches forward for her hand. Natasha lets him grab it, mostly because she wants to feel his bear-paw encase her hand again, but also because she needs _something_ to ground her in the present instead of reliving the cold panic she felt when they found his body. 

He pulls her in closer, and a small part of her wonders if he’s going to kiss her, but then he hugs her and it’s so much better. 

“I missed you,” she admits into his neck, because he is – oh fuck it. She says it because it’s the truest thing in her world right now, and goddamn it, that’s enough. 

“I missed you too,” which is ridiculous of him to say because Bucky _broke_ him, and he’s been _unconscious_ for several days and how could he miss her when she’s hardly left? But Natasha lets his words sink in, lets herself sink in; lets the world burn on for a moment without them. 

 _Fuck the dreams,_ Natasha thinks as she burrows further into his arms, completely and deliberately ignoring the exasperated sighs of Sam Wilson and Steve’s nurse, _I want him instead._

**One**

_“Take that money, watch it burn. Sink in the river, the lessons I’ve learned.”_

* * *

The dreams started after the clusterfuck that was New York. 

The yearnings started after they became friends. 

The love, well, Natasha isn’t quite _there_ yet, but maybe she’s getting close. 

She tried to walk away in the cemetery, she really did, but the previous night in Sam’s spare bedroom played through her mind and then she just _couldn’t._

_“He probably doesn’t want to be found. They’ve probably wiped him again,” Natasha knows she’s being unkind, but she can’t let him go in half-cocked like this. He knows who she is so she doesn’t let it bother her too much that’s she’s being unkind._

_“He’s my best friend, Nat, and he remembered. He dragged me out of the Potomac, for Christ’s sake. I can’t do nothing,” his bag is packed and he sitting at the foot of the bed in a pair of boxers while she rests against the headboard in his shirt. Their first night in this room, they had come together countless times until they met the sun, and then they came together once more, slower, more languidly, the heat of their supernova passion quieting down to a steady fire._

_“You can’t think of him as your best friend, it’ll cloud your judgment. You need to think of him as The Winter Soldier, or else you’ll get hurt again,” she’s not telling him not to go, just like he didn’t tell her to not disappear. She’s telling him, asking him, to be careful: to come back alive. She sees his shoulders slump just the slightest bit in acceptance._

_Natasha moves to kneel behind him, wrapping her arms him, leaning her face into the crook between his neck and shoulder, breathing in his smell of peppermint. She feels him lean back into her, and one hand moves up to touch hers where they rest over his heart. They don’t speak for a long time, but they don’t need to._

_“Remember the last time we were in here? And you asked me if I would trust you to save my life?” Steve asks softly into the flesh of her forearm. She nods against his neck, her heartbeat picking up the slightest bit in anticipation._

_“I meant what I said. But now I need you to do something for me,” Natasha almost imperceptibly stiffens and she hates,_ **_hates_ ** _, the part of her mind that reflexively catalogues the various ways she can make him disappear._

_“I need you to promise me that I can trust you to save your own life, Natasha,” he pulls her around so that she is straddling his lap and she would be wearing a wicked grin given their mutual states of undress, but he’s surprised her, again._

_Natasha is silent for a few moments, her first instinct is to lie and say yes, but if she’s learned anything the past so many months, it’s that she doesn’t_ **_want_ ** _to lie to Steve, of all people._

_So she doesn’t. She nods and then she kisses him._

It wasn’t a declaration of love, not even close, but it clung to Natasha’s long-denied heart all the same. She might not ever get around to saying the words, she hopes that she will, hopes that she’ll be brave enough to give that final piece of herself over to Steve, someday: hopes that she’ll stop questioning what love is and if she’s even capable of it. Steve is helping her with that, one day at a time, and he’s endlessly patient with her, so he doesn’t say it, not in so many words. But it’s there, unspoken and unsure, between them. 

But that unspoken thing, tenuous though it may be, feels warm and exhilarating, and she wants  _time_ to explore it's possibilities. 

So Natasha fights, bloodies her hands, and serves her own directive. 

 


End file.
